4 ms·
I think very few bits here are actually stored in-flight on the copper/fiber/radio at any time. Most of them are probably stored in various buffers of networkin
by avian 9y ago
I think very few bits here are actually stored in-flight on the copper/fiber/radio at any time. Most of them are probably stored in various buffers of networking equipment (which are ordinary semiconductor RAM). It would be interesting to see someone do an actual breakdown for, say, a transatlantic link.
My gut feeling says that only geostationary satellite links have any significant number of bits in-flight.
- detaro 9y agoVery simplified, but assuming a 5000 km cable and 300 000 km/s speed of light (is slightly slower in fiber), light needs 0.01666... seconds for that. At 10 Gbit/s (fairly slow), that'd mean ~ 166 Mbit or ~ 20 Megabyte in flight. (I hope I didn't forget a factor 1000 somewhere)
- avian 9y agoYour calculation makes sense. However, for those 20 MB in flight, how much data is stored in buffers? I think that could be approximated by comparing ping time with speed of light. e.g. if a 5000 km long link at 10 Gbit/s has latency of 0.0166 s, then you have zero buffering. If you have latency of 0.2 s, then around 2 Gbit of data must be stored in buffers somewhere, making 20 MB in flight only 1% of all data stored in such a ping filesystem.
- howard941 9y agoHow about the earth-moon-earth path for 768,000km? EDIT: For the EME path that's around 3 gigs in flight
- adrianN 9y agoWe've found a viable way to a space elevator: Sell it as a delay-line storage device.
- devrandomguy 9y agoIn a small toroidally shaped universe, your radio is also your memory. All emissions eventually return to their origin, but you can reorder memory transmissions by moving while the data is in flight.